TRI-STATES -- We are just hours away from election day 2008.

Some call this year's presidential campaign, the most important election of our lifetime.

Most of you probably know, you don't actually vote for president.

The way the U-S Constitution is set up, we vote for electors who then cast their vote for president.

It's called the electoral college.

It can be a little confusing to understand.

We're ready to take you school about the electoral college in tonight's Politics 101 report.

"Under our constitution, they thought that the average person would not know some of these people who are qualified to be president, so each state would select electors. Every elector would get two votes. They can cast their vote for any person they want to," says Rick Hardy, a Political Science professor at WIU.

The person who won the most votes would become president, the second place winner became Vice President. That was until 1800 when political parties were born. So the 12th amendment changed the way we select electors. Every state gets electors equivilent to the number of senators and representatives they have. Since 1910, we've had 435 members of Congress. That number doesn't change, but as people move, some states get more and other lose, which changes how many electors a state gets.

"People say that's not fair, it's not right. In order to change the electoral college, it would require a constitutional amendment. That requires 38 states to ratify it," adds Hardy.

Just to give you an idea of how unlikely an amendment banning the electoral college would be, over the years, there have been eleven thousand proposed amendments. More than half of those have been brought up since 1976. Out of those, only 27 have become amendments...ten of them are the Bill of Rights which were ratified in 1791.

"What you may see is this movement for the states to assign whoever wins the popular vote. Some states have passed legislation. In other words, if McCain was the popular vote in Illinois, Illinois would go to McCain, or if Obama was the popular vote, regardless of who won the state. That's a round about way of getting around the electoral college," says Keith Boeckelman, a Political Science professor with WIU.

"It depends on how you look at it. I can tell you right now, Obama's going to win Illinois, so does it matter? I don't know. If it was a popular vote and you were going to have a close election, a popular vote would matter more because your votes could be counted with those in other states. I don't want to say your vote doesn't matter, but I can also tell you we already know who's going to win a lot of these states," adds Boeckelman.

Another history tidbit for you, there have been only four cases in U-S history when a president won the electoral vote, but lost the popular vote.